The work went slowly. I wanted to be scholarly, encyclopedic. Better to be true and boring, I figured, than exciting and wrong. I owed at least that much gravitas to my stubborn old city, after the ruthless massacre of its bravest heroes and of so many innocents from its 70 nations. 

My report began with a confession that my opinion was exotic:  

A majority of Americans still accept the story, as told by their government, that the great crime of September 11th was carried out entirely by a conspiracy of Islamic fundamentalists... (and that) no U.S. government agency possessed foreknowledge of the perpetrators, or of the plan, useful enough to prevent the disaster. 

And all I can say is: Beware the new spin! Nearly every detail of last month's White House admissions was known to alert readers of the press long before May 16, 2002. The controlled revelations were designed to cover up a much higher level of foreknowledge and possible complicity among members of the government, and to immunize against the danger that the ongoing Congressional investigation into Sept. 11 reveals more devastating facts.  

In the administration's new cover-up, existing agencies like the FBI, CIA, INS and the National Security Agency are said to have failed to "connect the dots" due to incompetence, bureaucracy or chaotic structures. The new official story is being used to justify the proposed Homeland Security plan, which is to combine the Secret Service, the INS and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) into one department, and to integrate federal police, secret police, counterterror, emergency, domestic surveillance, data and intelligence functions within a single, all-seeing structure reminiscent of a totalitarian regime.  

The real evidence, however, suggests that the FBI's pre-Sept. 11 counterterror investigations were intentionally obstructed from within the government, so as to allow an attack to take place - with the possible motive that an attack would provide the pretext for a campaign of foreign wars and domestic repression, including the establishment of Homeland Security, America's future Stasi. 

To most people these theses sound bold and unlikely. Presenting evidence in their support requires many hours. But the first step, to demonstrate that the new cover-up is a lie, is child's play. In the White House spin control of May 16, Condoleeza Rice told the press that Bush was briefed on Aug. 6, 2001 about Qaeda designs to hijack planes in the United States. (We have since learned that the Aug. 6 memorandum to Bush, which the administration refuses to release, was titled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike U.S.") But no one in the administration, Rice insisted, ever dreamed these aircraft could be used in kamikaze attacks.  

A naked lie! During the G-8 summit conference in Genoa in July 2001, where President Bush (and his national security adviser, Rice) met the leaders of the world's other rich industrial countries, the Italian authorities closed Genoa Airport and set up anti-aircraft missiles around the summit location. Why? To defend against the threat that operatives of Osama Binladin might seize a plane and crash it into President Bush's hotel. News reporters doubted this was credible at the time, but the Italians insisted they had received specific warnings of such plans. (Sources: International Herald Tribune, July 16 and 20 and Sept. 27, 2001, LA Times, Sept. 27.) After the attacks, the Italians emphasized that they had informed the U.S. president's entourage of the danger. Gianfranco Fini, the Italian deputy prime minister, had this to say: 

Many people were ironic about the Italian secret services. But in fact they got the information that there was the possibility of an attack against the U.S. president using an airliner. That's why we closed the airspace and installed the missiles. Those who made cracks should now think a little. (TV interview, Sept. 2001 reported by ANSA news agency, quoted in LA Times, Sept. 27.)

And surely the administration did not miss the other high-level intelligence dispatches from U.S. allies that summer. Warnings of an imminent terrorist attack on the United States were delivered by the governments of France, Germany, Israel, Britain, Russia, Jordan, Morocco and Egypt. (News reports on each of these are reviewed on this site.) Here it will suffice to note that several of the foreign agencies, including the Russians, warned specifically that Qaeda pilots were being trained for kamikaze attacks inside the United States, and that sources within the Israeli intelligence agency, the Mossad, now claim they even passed on the names of men who were later identified as Sept. 11 hijackers. 

Every political reporter in the world can recall the story of last year's threat to Bush in Genoa. Yet this, typically, is how ABCNEWS.com presents the information, in a timeline of May 18:  

Mid July, 2001: Concern addressed about specific threat against President Bush at G-8 summit in Genoa, Italy, which brought together eight countries with the most powerful economies.

I emphasize the Genoa story in combination with Rice's May 16 statement not because of its importance, but because of the sheer implausibility of the lie. Apparently the administration can and will say anything, no matter how obviously false, and expects people to believe on faith. This is hardly the first time the government has been caught lying about 9/11, or the first time that the press is letting them get away with it. In the days after the attacks, the White House produced a series of mutually contradictory stories about supposed threats to the president on Sept. 11.  

Why do people have faith in anything the Bush administration says? 

Fear has a lot to do with it. After witnessing such sudden and random mass murder on television, who really wants to mistrust the government that is supposed to protect them? Cover-up campaigns take advantage of that basic feeling by offering several layers of deception and escapism. 

The gullible can go ahead and believe the administration failed to anticipate kamikaze attacks, because they were unthinkable, although the president received protection against exactly this type of attack two weeks earlier. 

Doubters are encouraged to focus on the Aug. 6 White House briefing, or on the FBI's "Phoenix memo," or on the Colleen Rowley memo, as though one of these provides all the answers. Vital as the release of documents may be, the minutiae tend to divert from the big picture.  

In a trick that dates back to the Nixon era, serious news junkies are lead to ask, "What did the president know and when did he know it?" As though all the world hinges on one person, who in reality might be isolated from the actual decision-making process! 

The most skeptical are allowed to choose the comforting idea that the government failed to connect the many pre-Sept. 11 dots into a useful picture, and is therefore incompetent beyond measure. Incompetent, but well-meaning. A stumblebum, but a good guy.  

Those who still refuse to believe can choose apathy and nihilism. Or they can plunge into the flood of conflicting facts, theories, legends, disinformation and possible truths available from the foreign press, the alternative press, and the Internet, where a few well-planted deceptive rumors and fantastic fairy tales can sow further confusion and discredit the very idea of skepticism. 

Against the machinery of a complex cover-up carried out by officials who have the authority of political leadership, it is hard to avoid being distracted from the indispensable first question, which is not "who knew what when," but 

Some people insist on knowing, and they never shut up. So on May 17, the day after Rice's bogus White House confession, Dick Cheney came out of his bunker with new threats for the rabble who would question his administration's actions. An open investigation of  the Sept. 11 attacks is dangerous as long as the nation is at war, Cheney said. How convenient. He previously said he expects the "War on Terror" to last another 50 years. Cheney and Rice made the rounds of the media that Sunday (May 20) to warn that horrible new attacks are coming, though neither would say what, when or where. This was a desperate, naked attempt to scare people into silence.  

The media took the cue and have since rehashed every possible terror scenario, from poisoned water at Disneyworld to walk-in suicide bombers at the Mall of America to suitcase nukes in Los Angeles. The FBI issued almost daily warnings based on the testimony of Abu Zubaydah, an alleged Qaeda lieutenant captured in Pakistan and reportedly being held at Camp X-Ray in Guantanomo Bay, Cuba. Zubaydah's picture as a captive has never been published, and he has never been directly quoted by the government spokespersons who report on his remarks. Assuming he really is one of the terrorist masterminds behind Sept. 11, as the U.S. government says, and assuming he really has been captured alive, Zubaydah is no doubt thrilled that with just a few choice words to his interrogators, he can cause great panic among the American people. 

That aim is also shared by the Bush administration, which always acts as though it could really use another attack. Sooner, rather than later. After all, people have become apathetic to the multiple and vague daily warnings, some of which Zubaydah allegedly says were inspired by the movie "Godzilla." People might return to the questions they were asking on May 16.  

Suddenly, on June 10th, a real threat finally seemed to materialize. At an appearance in Moscow, Attorney General John Ashcroft announced the arrest of a U.S. citizen with alleged Qaeda connections, who had plans to build a radiological bomb and detonate it in Washington. After the initial shock, and descriptions of what a "dirty bomb" might do, a few real details starting trickling out. It turned out Jose Padilla had been arrested on May 8. Why did Ashcroft choose June 10 and Moscow to make the announcement? Padilla had not actually built anything yet. Who tipped off the authorities as to his identity? "Abu Zubaydah." Is there sufficient evidence of the alleged bomber's plan? We may never know, since the alleged planner is being held indefinitely as an "enemy combatant" (much like the crown witness, Zubaydah) and has no right to counsel. But what state is the enemy? 

Of course I support the arrest and prosecution of anyone who plans to blow up a dirty bomb in Washington! As even the mainstream press has noted, however, denying a U.S. citizen his right to counsel, habeas corpus, and a court trial is a fatal precedent. If it stands, the government will gain the power to legally imprison anyone, indefinitely, on suspicion of thought-crime. On the same day as Ashcroft's announcement, June 10, Cheney presented his views on homeland security to the press. Also on the same day, the most prominent 9/11 Skeptics event to date was held. Relatives of 9/11 victims, former government officials and investigative journalists posed "Unanswered Questions" at the National Press Club in Washington. Tragically, C-SPAN reversed an earlier decision to cover the press conference, despite a flood of phone calls from viewers demanding that the event be broadcast. Instead, C-SPAN devoted its airtime to Cheney and, in a touch of irony, a planning meeting on the renovation of the Pentagon. Apparently, the mechanics of repairing the building are much more interesting to C-SPAN than the story of how it was hit in the first place. 

The month of stage-managed panic since the White House admission of May 16 has fulfilled at least one of its functions by distracting from the Sept. 11 revelations. What about those? Oh, yeah. Well, Cheney said that releasing the FBI Phoenix memo "to the press and public... would destroy our capacity to deal with future threats" (Washington Post, May 20). How so? This memo, readers may recall, was written by an FBI agent in advance of Sept. 11. He raised the possibility of aerial suicide attacks, and called on the FBI to investigate flight school students. The agent's proposal was killed, apparently at the middle levels of the FBI. The Phoenix memo has nothing to do with new threats. Cheney himself knows there is nothing shocking or dangerous in the memo's content that has not already been revealed. What frightens him is the precedent. He opposes the release of any Sept. 11 documents. 

Bush and Cheney know that secrecy is their lifeblood. Cheney is fighting the Congress and courts to keep memos of his meetings with executives of Enron and other energy companies secret. As part of the same pattern, Bush claimed personal ownership of state papers from his term as Texas governor, when he also dealt with Enron, and has spirited these to his own library. Ashcroft ordered all federal agencies to resist all requests for information under the Freedom of Information Act. Bush issued an order to block the automatic release of Reagan-era presidential documents to historians, as required under the law. These might shed light on the dealings of his father, then vice-president, and may even mention a CIA asset in the anti-Soviet Afghanistan jihad of the time, Osama Binladin, who was a U.S. client at least until 1989 -- and who maintained confirmed contacts with the CIA-allied intelligence agencies of Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, right up until Sept. 2001. 

Cheney's threats be damned. The only goal of the Bush administration's 9/11 cover-up is to keep the American public ignorant and confused. Just like the news of forewarnings is actually old, many of the "secrets" that Cheney wants to suppress have already been reported in the foreign and alternative press, and even in isolated major American media. 

Here are a few of the news items reported in the mainstream or foreign press or by other usually reliable sources and covered in detail in the following report: 

The CIA followed Mohamed Atta around Germany during the first six months of 2000, before he even came to the United States. The CIA did not inform the German authorities of its observation of Atta or of other presumed Qaeda members in Germany and Europe, reaching back at least four years. While under surveillance, Atta applied for a visa at the U.S. consulate in Berlin, which was approved and issued to him on May 18, 2000. This means that at least three of the alleged Sept. 11 hijackers were tracked by the CIA well in advance of the attacks. The U.S. military initially said at least five of the hijackers, including Atta, trained at U.S. bases. This was later denied. 

The FBI admits it has "no paper trail" establishing the alleged hijackers' connection to the Sept. 11 plot. Much of the evidence against them (like the "Magic Passport" of a hijacker found on top of rubble near the World Trade Center) appears to be fabricated. Several of the hijackers' identities were reported as stolen. The only official attempt to show Osama Binladin's authorship of the attacks released in advance of the Afghanistan war was published not by the U.S., but by the British government. The "Blair Paper" notoriously fails to make a credible case. 

Osama Binladin was a confirmed CIA asset in the anti-Soviet Afghanistan jihad, at least until 1989. In the mid-1980s, he was guided through domestic U.S. military facilities on a weapons shopping tour. U.S. funds, covert operatives and military trainers worked with the Pakistani military in creating the anti-Soviet "Afghan Arab" network. In the 1980s, the U.S. funded and planned the building of the "Afghan Arab" underground bases at Khost and Tora Bora, the same strongholds the U.S. later bombed. In the 1990s, the Afghan Arabs became the Qaeda network and, together with Pakistan, started off the Taliban movement that took over Afghanistan in 1996. It is unclear when or if and which relationships between American operatives and Afghan Arabs ever ended. In 1996, Washington refused Sudanese offers to extradite Osama. Washington backed the Pakistani-created Taliban at least until Aug. 1998. Osama's followers fought in Kosovo in 1998 alongside the Albanian KLA, a rebel army with full backing from the CIA. Osama maintained contacts to Prince Turki, the long-standing Saudi intelligence chief, until Turki was suddenly fired in the week before Sept. 11.  The mainstream French press insists Osama met with Prince Turki and with a CIA station chief during a July 2001 stay at the American Hospital in Dubai, where he received kidney treatments. 

In the past, Osama has claimed responsibility for actions that his group did not directly commit and could not have committed, such as the downing of U.S. Black Hawk military helicopters by Somali fighters during the Battle of Mogadishu in 1993.  

Overwhelming evidence suggests that the primary funders and organizers of Islamist (Sunni/Wahabbi fundamentalist) terrorism internationally reside in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, two long-term U.S. allies -- and not secular Iraq or Shiite Iran, as we are usually told by U.S. government experts. Iran and the Taliban were bitter enemies.  

A Bush executive order of Jan. 2001 suspended FBI investigations into the finances of the Binladin family, the BBC reported from London. The Bush family has done private business with the Binladin family for more than 20 years. Binladin money helped start off George Bush Jr.'s personal fortune. Both families invested in the Carlyle Group, a top military contractor that employs former president George H.W. Bush as its chief lobbyist. In the last two years, the elder Bush traveled at least twice to Saudi Arabia to pitch Carlyle contracts to the royal family. This administration, with largely the same top personnel as the first Bush administration, includes several men convicted for their roles in the crimes of Iran-Contra and is the most oil-connected, arms-connected, CIA-connected and Saudi-connectedin history. 

John O'Neill, lead FBI investigator of Qaeda from themid-1990s until 2001, resigned from the Bureau in July 2001. Two highlyregarded French reporters say he told them soon after that the U.S. governmentblocked a real investigation against Osama for years, because the financialtrail would lead back to members of the Saudi Arabian royal family, andpotentially endanger U.S.-Saudi relations. The reporters quote O'Neillas saying that the government has always been more interested in oil thanin the security of its citizens. O'Neill died in the collapse of the WorldTrade Center, where he had started a new job as the WTC's chief of counter-terrorismin August. 

A full-scale war in Afghanistan was planned and preparedin advance of Sept. 11. This has been effectively admitted by the Bushadministration, which says a plan to "wipe out Qaeda from the face of theearth," starting with an attack on the Taliban, was on the president'sdesk on Sept. 9. In June 2001, representatives of the U.S. government toldthe Taliban they had the choice between "a carpet of gold" (if they alloweda long-delayed oil pipeline to be built) or "a carpet of bombs." The largestBritish expeditionary force since the Falklands War and various Americanand NATO units were dispatched to the region in the month before Sept.11. 

The war fits in with the reigning geostrategic doctrineswithin the U.S. foreign policy establishment, which foresee the need toextend U.S. military reach into Central Asia so as to control the "worldheartland" and to encircle the two most serious potential rivals to U.S.power, China and Russia. Before Sept. 11, such an endeavor, if it actuallyinvolved the loss of American lives, would have met with precious littlesupport among the American people. Central Asia is also the location ofthe largest untapped oil reserves in the world. The petroanalysts of theoil industry expect world oil demand to exceed available supply and leadto deadly shortages and wars for declining reserves at some point withinthe next 3 to 15 years. (Whether or not they are right, this is what theybelieve.) Enron and Unocal were among the American companies lobbying theTaliban for a pipeline. 

At least a half-dozen foreign intelligence agencieswarned the United States that an attack was coming, some even specifyingthat it would involve suicide pilots and the obvious targets in New Yorkand Washington.  

Ashcroft stopped taking commercial flights in June2001. The mayor of San Francisco and others, including a group of Pentagongenerals, received warnings not to fly on Sept. 11. Other sources, likethe former impeachment attorney David Schippers, say they saw governmentdocuments on specific warnings about an imminent attack on Lower Manhattan.  

Numerous individuals abroad have claimed advance knowledgeof the attacks, or (in several documented cases) actually tried to informthe U.S. authorities that an attack was coming. Afterthe attacks, financial investigators in New York, Chicago, Europe, Japanand China said they were certain speculators made millions or even billionsin insider trades based on advanced knowledge of the attack targets. Theseinvestigations are still in progress. 

The head of ISI, Pakistan's equivalent of the CIA,may have been Mohamed Atta's primary financier. ISI chief Ahmed Mahmudwas in Washington on Sept. 11, following a full week of meetings with hisU.S. government contacts. Mahmud was made to resign on October 7 at theinsistence of the FBI, who discovered his agency had wired $100,000 toAtta via a middleman, as the Indian press revealed. Newsweek corroboratesthat $100,000 was wired to Atta from Pakistan. The man who wired the money,as corroborated by the Wall Street Journal, was Ahmad Umar Sheikh, a knownterrorist with close links to ISI and the Pakistani militant Islamist movement.Sheikh is now being tried as the mastermind behind the killing of WSJ reporterDaniel Pearl. 

According to the FAA and NORAD, on Sept. 11 AmericanAirlines Flight 77 "disappeared from primary radar" for 35 minutes afterits transponder was turned off, just as it had reached the eastern edgeof Ohio. This was convenient for the hijackers, because disappearing wasthe only way this plane could have ever made it all the way back to Washingtonand hit the Pentagon 58 minutes after the original attack without beingintercepted by Air Force patrols. (Interception is not shootdown. It isan established, automatic procedure for dealing with off-course aircraft,including passenger airliners, normally initiated within minutes aftera plane deviates from its route.)  

The debris from the destruction of United AirlinesFlight 93 was spread out over eight miles, suggesting a mid-air break-up.  

The collapse of the 47-story building WTC 7, whichcontained a CIA station, the New York Mayor's Office of Emergency Management,and  the headquarters of the Securities and Exchange Commission, cannothave been caused solely by the earlier collapse of the nearby Twin Towers. 

The anthrax originated with illegal U.S. governmentstockpiles. The timing and targets of the mailings, which hit just as theAfghanistan campaign began, were enormously suspicious. The attacks onthe Senate targeted the Democratic leadership only. Anthrax caused theFBI to funnel its personnel away from the Sept. 11 investigation, frightenedthe media, and shut down congressional business during passage of the unconstitutionalUSA PATRIOT Act, which overturns the Bill of Rights and grants the enablingpowers for a dictatorship. Almost no one in the legislature read the 300-pagePatriot Act before voting for it and running away to the safety of theirhomes. The FBI traced the anthrax strain to an illegal army program anda CIA contractor. Since then, the anthrax investigation has stalled. 

All elements of the new Homeland Security apparatusand counterterror planning, including the text of the Patriot Act, wereprepared and ready for presentation on Sept. 11.  

In November 2001, FBI and CIA sources complained tothe press that the government's electronic information-gathering arm, theNational Security Agency, was destroying all documents relating to Sept.11 that included information about U.S. citizens or companies.Both lead agents of the FBI's post-Sept. 11 investigation(PENTTBOM) resigned suddenly in November. FBI agents claim the post-Sept.11 investigation has been hindered from above. Agents in Chicago have suedthe government to let them release suppressed information, possibly evenmore devastating than that already revealed by the whistle-blowers in Minnesotaand Phoenix. 

In January 2002, Cheney and Bush put pressure on theDemocratic leadership in Congress to delay and strictly limit the Sept.11 probe. Before hearings finally started in June, panel members complainedthat the CIA was hindering the investigation. The first head of the investigation,who resigned, was a former high CIA official. The panel meets in secretand is reportedly divided over what questions to pursue. 

A report leaked in November 2001 by agents of the U.S.Drug Enforcement Agency claims that a large ring of Israeli spies was attemptingto penetrate secure government facilities in the United States before Sept.11. About 120 alleged Israeli spies were arrested and deported on immigrationcharges, both before and after the attacks. They may have been the sourceof information on Qaeda activities in the United States, which was deliveredby Israel to the U.S. government in advance of the attacks. The informationon this possible connection has been suppressed. 

Capturing Osama Binladin was never a goal of the Afghanistanwar, Tommy Franks and Donald Rumsfeld have admitted. 

The Osama "confession video" of November 2001, calledthe smoking gun evidence of his having masterminded the attacks, is a fake,regardless of whether the man in the video is Osama. 

Last November, at the height of the war in Afghanistan,U.S. forces allowed Pakistan military to airlift thousands of Pakistanipro-Taliban fighters and possible Afghan Taliban or Qaeda agents out ofthe besieged town of Herat. They escaped to Pakistan and many of them arereportedly among the forces infiltrating Kashmir, the flashpoint of a potentialnuclear war with India. 

The new Afghan premier, Hamid Karzai, and the new U.S.envoy to Afghanistan are both former lobbyists for the same American oilcompanies whose efforts to build a pipeline were frustrated by the Taliban.UNOCAL announced it had reached a pipeline deal in December. The WhiteHouse issued a congratulatory statement on its web page. 
 

In our investigation, we have not uncovered a single piece of paper—either here in the  United States or in thetreasure trove of  information that has turned up in Afghanistan andelsewhere—that mentioned  any aspect of the Sept. 11 plot.   

Robert Mueller speech at Commonwealth Club, San Francisco, April 19.

utter and unforgivable cluelessness, or 

an intent to allow the attacks to go ahead, or 

involvement in the attacks by elements within the U.S.government, or among U.S. client states like Saudi Arabia,

An insiders' conspiracy actually setting up the attacks,or making use of genuine Islamic extremists as the apparent perpetrators,need not involve a large or unwieldy cast. The participating "elements"could be top officials, a cabal on the middle levels of the military orintelligence, spooks in "black ops" on the periphery of the government'scovert arms, foreign agents, or a combination.  I don't pretend toknow, but I do know that corrupt governments have staged faked terrorismand faked attacks by enemies in the past. As horrible and irrational asthe idea of an "inside job" sounds, history is full of precedents, someof which we review here. 

As we shall see in the report, the architects of the presentregime, including former President George H.W. Bush, in the past have committedeven worse crimes than those of Sept. 11, and shown utter disregard forthe lives of ordinary Americans. The villains of the three biggest warswaged by Bush and his son - Noriega, Saddam, and Osama - are all formerclients of the family and its administrations. The administration and othermembers of the U.S. power elite would have had many motives to let a terroristattack go ahead, exactly at the time it did, although its ferocity mayhave surprised them. There are also many precedentsfor multiple agencies of the U.S. government cooperating to successfullycover up great crimes after the fact, including actions that caused thedeaths of thousands of U.S. citizens, for decades. 

We cannot rely simply on the idea that Islamic fundamentalistterrorists are fanatic, ruthless, and capable of pulling off large-scaleattacks. This is true, but proves nothing. Logic demands we consider thepossibility that the administration, or other actors beyond Qaeda, wereinvolved in the attacks. Honest inquiry must proceed from the Socraticprinciple, 

Truth is what can be shown using confirmable facts andlogic, not what a state or other authority says. Until now, the administrationgot away with denying foreknowledge of the attacks. From now on, it willrely mainly on spinning the facts. By portraying the evidence of foreknowledgeas an investigative "failure" due to the laxity or incompetence of theFBI and other agencies, it seeks the justification for a new, all-encompassingand centralized police state.  

Otherwise, the administration seems to fervently wishthat new and dire events will distract attention from the unraveling ofthe official 9/11 story.